It is not reasonable to presume that people are likely to commit suicide over the threat of a 6 month prison sentence. You know that I think the Heymann prosecution was way out of line, but your argument here is a caricature.

Referencing your earlier comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5165258), this is a perfect example of what happens when lawyers stop thinking about people and start thinking about cases: it becomes OK that people involved in the case are killing themselves, so long as it doesn't exceed some percentage of cases.

I try really hard not to be one of those laymen that regards all lawyers as soulless, but this right here is the kind of thing that leads to that opinion of the law profession.

"But they handle tens of thousands of cases" should never be used as a defense in the death of a litigant -- a person. At the very least, the death of a litigant should force all parties involved to examine their actions and see if they might have been able to do anything reasonable to prevent it. Justifying it in the abstract, saying essentially that it's OK as long as it's not too many, is despicable.

Your ad hominem-fueled rage is clouding your reading comprehension. If you read down from that sub-thread, you'll see I'm talking about Carmen Ortiz's moral culpability being bound by her reasonable expectations about the situation. One previous suicide out of tens of thousands of prosecutions in her office is insufficient to show that she should have reasonably expected aggressive prosecution could have led to another suicide. You can't blame people for consequences they couldn't reasonably have been expected to see coming, and suicide is almost always such a consequence.